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“Listen, Jake. He’s obviously smart. And not the typical walking cheese our school produces. But I’m not…” I trail off as someone taps on the window behind me, and I whirl. Blue-gray eyes meet mine through theglass.
“He’s there, isn’the?”
I barely hear Jake’s smugvoice.
The glass is smudgy, I realize. But it only serves to remind me how handsome Wes Robinsonis.
Good restaurants have low lighting for a reason—to make your companions look better. Like the red-lightdistrict.
Here in the bright daylight, he looks like an angel. The tall, mildly uncomfortable kind, with good posture, a too-tight tie, distracting shoulders, and a button-down shirt two shades darker than his eyes tucked into charcoal pants. The expression on his face says he wants to be here as much as Ido.
I go to click off with Jake, but he’s already hung up. I push the door open, and Wes steps back to let me swing it wide. “How much of that did youhear?”
“Something about cheese. For someone who orders vegan food, you spend a lot of time talking about animalproducts.”
At least I remembered the deadpan accurately. The man’s drier than a ginmartini.
“What are you doing here?” Staring into his handsome face is a brutal reminder of my blindness lastnight.
“I still want yourhelp.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.” I brush past him toward my desk, but I feel him trailing afterme.
“I need marketers. I thought this was a marketing firm. Do I have to go in anotherdoor?”
His stubbornness rubs at me, but he’s not wrong. Despite the fact that it’s almost the end of the day, the office is half-full. I’m sure more than one of my colleagues would be happy to talk tohim.
I turn to look across the partition behind the product list on my screen, feeling Kendall’s gaze onus.
“Kendall, this is Wes Robinson. He has deluded ideas about making people fall inlove.”
“I’m a researcher,” he corrects, shoving both hands in his pockets. “I have factual, evidence-based ideas about how people fall in love. Which I can show you if you’ll give me onehour.”
My breath sticks in my chest as we stare each other down. I want to reach over and loosen that tieagain.
At first, all I could think about when I looked at him was last night, and my humiliation at jumping him. But he’s different today. His gaze is sharp. Today, he doesn’t sound like a man inmourning.
He sounds like a man with a mission. If I didn’t know better, I’d think my attempts to turn him away only made him moreinsistent.
“Rena, you could still come to goat yoga instead?” Kendall asks, allinnocence.
“Goat yoga.” Wes rubs a hand over his neck as if one of the creatures’ beards is scratching him rightnow.
Kendall nods. “They walk all over your back with their littlehooves.”
“And youpayforthat?”
His incredulous response comes so fast I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling. “Rain check on the goats,Kendall.”
Wes and I are out the door by the time I realize this was probably her plan allalong.
4
Wes
Istartdown the sidewalk in front of Rena’s building only to pull up three paces away. My hand lifts to block the sun from my eyes as I scan the two signs at street level. “Whoa.”
“What?”
